Mr. Dunne bought a yearling last year for $50,000 and resold it for $1.2 million as a 2-year-old in the spring. (Across the board, pinhookers made over $36 million buying yearlings last September at Keeneland and selling them in the 2021 spring sales.)
Yet Mr. Dunne has had plenty of losses over the years, he said. “More horses don’t make the 2-year-old sales than the yearling sales because they have to do more to get there,” he said. “Athletic prowess is the differentiator. But it’s guesswork.”
Even with online buyers finding their way into the industry, it’s not as Wild West as it might sound. Many had agents assess the horses in person last year before buying. But as buyers got more used to the process this year, that wasn’t always the case. Some bought the horses online as they would buy a work of art at Sotheby’s or Christie’s.
“We’ve had horsemen doing things the same way for decades,” Ms. Arvin said. “It was getting them comfortable that this was good. A lot of sales, there was hustle and bustle. We were concerned to take it on the internet and lose that excitement. In the end, it’s the love of the horse and the environment.”
And since many of the horses stayed in Kentucky or at least the United States for training, she said, the people on the ground were probably going to advise the buyers, whether they were in person or online, about where to train the horse.
Whether that hobby pays off is still to be seen. After all, wealthy buyers have waded into an area of the horse market that has traditionally been risky.
“As pinhookers, we create a good commercial market in the beginning,” Mr. Woods said. “Then the buyer comes along and gets to see these horses trained and gets a better indication of what the horse will be on the racetrack. Be it good or bad, people can then decide if they’re going to spend a lot of money on a horse or if the horse they thought they liked isn’t that good.”
Those answers are a few years away.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/24/your-money/horse-auctions-online-buyers.html
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